I’ve been trying to find a good Marxist instance, but Lemmygrad and Hexbear are widely hated. Why is that? Are there any good leftist instances?
I can’t speak about lemmygrad since the instances I’m on all defederate from it, but Hexbear users have a reputation for being generally aggressive, grating, and immature. It’s like that kid in class who keeps interrupting the teacher because they think they’re funny and clever. e.g., some were screaming at me that I can’t be an anarchist and I know nothing about anarchism since I’m married, replying with third-grade tier memes for some confusing reason
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I fully agree. The problem is when we point out that they’re not leftist, they assume it’s because we conflate leftism with liberalism, whereas this is not the case at all. I think they’re not leftist because their antisocial/anti-human beliefs are antithetical to the concept of community and only serve to derail any chance we have to work together to create a new system. I can’t imagine that anyone who legitimately seeks the goal of a stateless, classless society would behave as they do.
Thought I should add it was them informing me that certain countries banning same-sex marriage while endorsing heterosexual marriage is just fine, actually. They espoused an objectively homophobic belief, and when I referenced my own marriage, they switched to calling me ignorant about anarchism. There are anarchist texts exploring the issue and some of the potential problems with traditions like marriage, but it’s not dogma. Nor do I view my own relationship as hierarchical.
TL;DR They were being objectively homophobic.
This has the energy of a white gay man in a marriage pointing at a trans polycule and calling them homophobic because they said he had a bad take about how bourgeois privileges are more important than positive rights for queer homeless people.
White gay men wielding their gayness as a cudgel against people who are queerer and more marginalized then them sure is a gross thing to see.
Your comment is a perfect example of the pants-shittingly off-topic LGBTphobic nonsense I was receiving in the other thread, so thanks for proving my point.
You … you do realize that trans people and other “queerer” people than me engage in same-sex marriage too, right? And that it’s objectively homophobic for a policy to exist forbidding same-sex marriage while permitting heterosexual marriage? And that not all trans people are poly? I know people that fit all of the above, and every one of them deserves validation, and it would be unfathomably LGBTphobic for me to arbitrarily determine which ones are “queer enough” to be part of the community. You don’t see the problem with this line of thinking, with your entire statement? Of course you do, you’re just being deliberately cruel for your own amusement.
There it is, folks. Exhibit A
Edit: That user is a moderator on [email protected]
I’m unsubscribing immediately! And I blocked and reported that user, too.
My love is for all the LGBT+ community, and for the straight cis community as well. I just want equity. For anyone who had to read that homophobic comment above, just know that I do care, and I’m here for you.
And that it’s objectively homophobic for a policy to exist forbidding same-sex marriage while permitting heterosexual marriage?
Yes!
Do you acknowledge that some countries like the US which allow gay marriage materially harm lgbt people more than some countries that have banned gay marriage? Or is it only homophobic when it impacts your middle class ass?
Do you acknowledge that many socialist countries are progressive and moving toward more rights, and just starting from a worse starting point because of violently enforced colonial attitudes from countries that now claim to be progressive?
Do you acknowledge that Cuba, a socialist nation that you’d accuse of being tankie, is the place where lgbt people have the most material rights?
Do you acknowledge that communists have led every single queer liberation movement that has forced concessions from ruling governments? Or do you want to whitewash the communists out of stonewall?
You … you do realize that trans people and other “queerer” people than me engage in same-sex marriage too, right?
Yes, I’m one of them. And I’d happily give up my right to be married if it would erase queer homelessness, and erase conversion therapy camps, and erase the continual murder of black and indigenous trans women in our society.
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Do you want to hear the punchline? I caught a temp ban for expressing my plan to block their instance as soon as that is made possible for users. I will admit I was a bit harsh in that I said I wanted them to be “effectively silenced,” but this was extremely mild compared to their comments to me.
Political views aside, the way they promote their political views is unappealing.
Look through any of their popular threads. Everyone piles on any comment which doesn’t align perfectly with the agreed perspective.
Everyone piles on any comment which doesn’t align perfectly with the agreed perspective.
Sounds like every popular community on Lemmy. The only difference is the “agreed perspective”.
Not really.
In most communities you can at least entice some robust discussion, hexbear just seems sp aggressively intolerant of alternative views.
That’s basically every political sub I’ve come across browsing in my instance
It’s a question of degree.
They are hardline Marxist-Leninists, something that is very rare in the western world even amongst those who identify as leftist or socialist. If their views make you uncomfortable, then you’re not a ML, which is okay.
Left-wing politics is a very broad spectrum, and a lot of Lemmy users lean towards the more moderate end which brings them into conflict with the more radical communities that are Lemmygrad and Hexbear.
That’s all there is to it.
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That’s all there is to it.
That’s it? Nothing about their notoriety for posting pictures of pigs pooping on their balls as part of their lively defense of MLism?
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Sounds like Lemmy’s version of r/atheism 10+ years ago. Atheism itself is fine, but the sub became an insufferable circle jerk.
“Tankie” is a term that’s applied to literally any communist. I’ve heard it used against Trotskyists and fucking social democrats.
So, what’s actually the problem with them? Are they Maoists? CPC apologists?
They like Stalin, Putin , Xi and Kim. And defend everything they do.
Like WTF? How can a communist defend putin!?
II hear this constantly, I have yet to see it one time ever by ANY communists on ANY website.
Visit a few Ukraine threads, it’s one of the topics the fanatics pile on.
My point was that tankies are a “special” subset of communists.I have. I’ve still never seen it. What I do constantly see in those threads is dehumanization of Russian people and calls for mass genocide of them, though. Calling them orcs and talking about how they all deserve to die.
I don’t believe you, to be honest. One can acknowledge Russian security concerns (like multiple U.S. military officials and many high members of the UN have) without praising Putin. And I’ve still never seen a single communist say anything good about Putin. On any website.
I’ve never seen what you’re describing. Not about Russians anyway. I’ve seen far too many zionists saying that shit about Palestinians tho.
I’m glad for your sake. It’s pretty gross.
People who throw the word “tankie” around indiscriminately aren’t using it right. From what I’ve seen, it applies specifically to extreme communist fanboys who are apologists for communist militarism. For example, Tankies will say that the Tiananmen Square massacre was either justified or didn’t happen.
Just being a fan of communism doesn’t make someone a tankie.
Edit: see below for an excellent example
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Thank you!
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Just take a look at this question, all of the answers are from lemmygrad and hexbear users. You are not going to get a good answer from them because they’re the people you’re asking the question about.
They are not hated they’re just annoying, no one really cares about their opinions the problem is is that they try and push their opinions on everybody else.
Yeah, they have a very alternative interpretation of geopolitics and they’re loud about it. If there was a flat earth instance with users that spammed every physics thread there would be some grumbling just the same.
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The hexbear and lemmygrad users/posts I run across in All mostly remind me of those street corner preachers. I don’t care one way or another about their ideologies but it’s tiring that they always feel the need to shout it in your face.
I don’t hate them but find them to be obnoxious and mostly cult-like.
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Well, when I see a .ml user from here on out I’m not sure I’ll be able to give them the same sort of leeway.
I had one of their users confirm they were racist. Then I saw that only the parts where our conversation was removed by mods, and not shit canning the user.
You want people to like you, don’t lie down with racists.
I concur about .ml. It’s been eye opening being on the receiving end of a homophobic rant by a moderator of their world news community implying I’m not queer enough. It wouldn’t surprise me that they’re racist, too. Bigots tend to subscribe to more than one strain of bigotry.
I know it shouldn’t matter what people like that think, but I’d be lying if I said I’m not disappointed and dismayed. I’ve survived so many things and had a long hard road to self-acceptance. It’s disgusting to be invalidated by someone who likely has more than I’ve ever had.
I used to be confused when right wing nutjobs would say that the left is Racist, or Homophobic, or bigoted in general, it would make me confused as that wasn’t my experience and it’s not baked into left wing ideology. Hell, I didn’t really see it on reddit when I was there (the hate was from right wingers or gatekeepers).
Then I came here. Nice place in general. Waaaay better users than reddit as a whole. But now I know where the RWNJs got the idea.
Ain’t that the truth! I will say during my tenure on reddit, I heard of CTH and thought to myself, “I ultimately support a similar vision for our future, how bad can it be?” I was shocked to find one of the most exclusionary, bigoted dens of filth I’d seen outside of places like r/T_D
Ableist and bigoted language abounded, it was impossible to engage because they’d immediately bristle when anyone they perceived as beneath them wandered in.
I see a lot of the same things here. It’s really disappointing to us leftists who actually want to effect change. No one will listen to people like that. Hopefully they’re just kids who grow out of … whatever this is.
Middle class white gay men could use their privilege to help out the rest of the lgbtq community instead of being right wingers, but then that would require examining their privileges, and we can’t have that.
So pointing out those privileges and how different rights affect different subsections of the community differently because of those privileges is homophobic./s
Fuck off.
I believe you’ve answered your own question.
Lemmy isn’t Marxist-only. The majority of Lemmy users are what the more vocal Lemmygrad and Hexbear users deride as “libs.” As a thought experiment, imagine that you are one of us for a moment and then browse Local on one of those.
I haven’t seen or maybe haven’t noticed much of lemmygrad. But hex bear has a culture of spamming the same handful of images, using them like punctuation in their posts. And they show up huge in my reader at least (I just found out they look small to them.) So it’s like you’re trying to have a discussion and someone comes parading through with like five crappy drawings that take up all the space. Also I don’t mind having Marxists around but they tend to want to steer every discussion toward it, regardless of its relevance. Can’t wait to be able to block the instance.
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I’m the only person I’ve ever seen on Lemmy running an instance from a nominally communist country (maybe there are others?). You can come hang out with me I guess. I’m not qualified to be a proper communist though – I’ve read very little of the literature, and leave politics to the Party. Which I am not even actually a member of. I’m basically Boxer from Animal farm, but ended up happily married and with a decent standard of living instead of shipped off to the glue factory.
I’m am a mercenary science hermit though, so my instance is very quiet! There are three people on my instance, two are me and the other is a bot I wrote doing I-Ching divinations using physics.
I am interested in the physics divination bot. How’s it work?
There’s a detailed description on my home instance, along with other stuff.
The short version is it uses a pair of BJT transistors to produce and amplify diode breakdown noise. That’s amplified to TTL levels by some hex inverters. Then an 8-bit microcontroller passes it through a Von Neumann whitewashing algorithm (clock-cycle balanced in assembly language) to produce unbiased bits, which it accumulates into bytes. It’s not a ‘safe’ way to use transistors and they will fail one day, but it will be fine for quite some time still.
Then an ESP32 samples the bytes from the 8-bit MCU. It connects to Wi-Fi and pushes it to the cloud over MQTT. A server listens for the random bytes, and uses them with the traditional I-Ching algorithm (yarrow-stick probabilities). Coding the yarrow-stick probabilities into an algorithm was a pain compared to the newer method that uses coin tosses :D
Also I had to convert the I-Ching to JSON, so I could programmatically pull the correct divination from it. The whole thing is gloriously absurd.
I have build a few particle detectors so I can use quantum-tunneling to produce the entropy instead (so an upgrade from a hardware RNG to a quantum RNG), but the radiation sources I have access to are a bit too weak to generate sufficient entropy.
I can’t imagine any of this has any practical application, unless you happen to be a time traveler. In that case have work to do, meet me last week and we’ll talk about it :P
Oh incidentally if the bot is down, let me know and I’ll gently beat it into submission so it works again.
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Lemmygrad I can’t comment on. As far as I can tell they basically just talk politics and I’m not interested in microwaving my brain by obsessing about politics online. Haven’t seen them out in any of the threads I’ve been on.
Hexbear I’ve enjoyed honestly. They’ve got nice hobby communities and it’s all I’m here for. Quality of discussion is usually pretty good. My take on people hating Hexbear is people have made their personality getting mad about politics and Hexbear don’t share their views. People screaming “tankie!” just seemed deranged to me, literally who cares what a handful of nerds in the US think of China. Neither of you have any influence on what China does at all.
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tankie
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samee
Well it’s because they are Marxist.
In the Lemmy culture Marxism has a very bad name because almost religious overtones of its adherents.Which is of ironically very much what Marx was warning against. But that’s how it works right now.
Leninism is antithetical to Marxism. As you said. If they were Marxist there wouldn’t be a big issue. They’re Leninist as an angry 13 year old can be. Combined with the fact that people in the West, the US especially, have no idea what either one is. And that’s the problem.
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God yeah. Even if they had some interesting ideas they’ve been lost to all the circle jerking that there’s no way of seeing how any of them can be taken seriously.
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Lemmygrad and Hexbear aren’t “leftist” in the confused sense that Americans usually mean “leftist.” They’re actually leftist in the original sense, meaning that they want to abolish private ownership of the means of production. To the extent they’re “widely hated,” it’s largely because the Anglosphere has been indoctrinated against real, actual socialism their entire lives.
That’s not the part people have an issue with, the part where their users deny genocides, call everyone that has a less extreme left opinion of politics Nazis, end up being so “anti-racism” that they’re racists themselves and take all critics as personal attacks, that’s what people have an issue with.
Holy shit you got them to brigade your comment. They might as well be bots, I think Chat GPT’s “intelligence” outpaces them.
As is tradition! What’s funny is that they’re supposed to be defederated from my instance so I don’t know why they even see my comments… Their admin even called my instance “sh.itsfullof.nazis” in their defederation message because they were angry that they were confronted to people who disagreed with them when they brigaded our administration communities…
They have a community dedicated to organizing brigades so it’s no surprise that they are brigading their comment
The rules in the side bar are very telling
Of course the last time I mentioned it’s existence with one of my alts I got a 2 week sitewide-ban so this comment probably won’t last long
Edit: Spleling
Extremely accurate
I literally netted a 2 week sitewide-ban on one of my alts in this thread for a softer worded take than this
Don’t know how I managed to escape consequences so far 😂
end up being so “anti-racism” that they’re racists themselves
anyone complaining about “reverse racism” or “anti white racism” is a complete joke. like boo fucking hoo, someone called you a cracker on the internet, get over it.
Racism has a definition that’s fairly easy to understand and yes people of all colors can be victims and even people of the same skin colour can be racists against one another because racism isn’t necessarily about the color of your skin, it can be about your ethnicity.
Racism:
prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism by an individual, community, or institution against a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.Ethnicity:
the quality or fact of belonging to a population group or subgroup made up of people who share a common cultural background or descent.If you had taken a crowd of anonymous Germans all dressed the same in 1935, how would you have told who was a Jew and who wasn’t? You wouldn’t have been able to because they were all just white people.
What do you call it when 100 years ago in a first world white country the population that speaks one official language has an infant mortality rate comparable to that of colonial Africa while the population that speaks the other official language and lives in the same cities has an infant mortality rate comparable to any other first world nation?
Was the Rwanda genocide not racism because it was two groups with the same skin colour? What about what happened in Yugoslavia?
My white friend who went to China to study had to sit through multiple explanations by many Chinese student of the levels of intelligence being affected by skin colour and ethnicity and guess what, whites weren’t at the top! “All white people are dumber than Indians who are dumber than Koreans who are dumber than Chinese.” Are you telling me that isn’t racism against white people (and anyone that isn’t Chinese)? Because I sure would hope someone would call me a racist if I was saying the same thing about people of another skin colour or ethnicity!
That isn’t what they are talking about, hopefully. But if it is, I agree, a hearty “lol” is in order.
they replied confirming to me that what they were complaining about was in fact racism against white people, given that it seems to be a pretty common bit on lemmygrad to call people crackers and compare them to that kid who went onto fox news to complain about his face being photoshopped onto a picture of a ritz cracker by left wing students at his university that seems to be what they were complaining about
Bad interpretation is bad
That’s a liberal with no framework. No one denies genocides (pro-tip just because the western media says it’s a genocide doesn’t make it a genocide.) Being so anti-racist you are the real racist is the Liberal Democratic party who elected a hard-core segregationist as president, not a Marxist Leninist. No one except people like you give a fuck about personal attacks. lol.
The “Uyghur genocide” is bullshit Atlanticist propaganda, and English-language Wikipedia is basically NATOpedia in its slant on the topic, so yes we will deny it. It’s a product of the new Cold War propaganda campaign against China.
Here are some properties of any conspiracy theory worth it’s name:
- Closed Ideological Systems: They provide an all-encompassing explanation for various events or states, with everything fitting into their worldview.
- Immunity to Facts: Any contrary evidence is dismissed as false or considered part of the conspiracy.
- Enemy Construction: They tend to draw a clear line between “us” (those who “know the truth”) and “them” (the supposed conspirators).
- Adaptability: Conspiracy narratives can change and incorporate new “evidence” or events to maintain their credibility.
It matches for QAnon and the MAGA crowd as well as the lemmygrad crowd.
More often than not, when Americans say leftist they really mean left-liberalism a la Bernie Sanders, which is really center-left at most, and not actually leftist in the original sense, a sense which Americans have forgotten thanks to two Red Scares and the first Cold War.
True, but leninists are not leftist in any significant sense either. They are more authoritarian/ totalitarian than they are left or right.
Any politically focused space on the Internet, left or right, is a cesspool of toxic lies and hatred of anyone outside their sphere
